Wesley Corpus

How many thousands, within little more than this, hath the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up ! Numbers sunk at Port-Royal, and rose no more! Many thousands went quick into the pit at Lima ! The whole city of Catanea, in Sicily, and every inhabitant of it, perished together. Nothing but heaps of ashes and cinders show where it stood. Not so much as one Lot escaped out of Sodom ! And what shall we say of the late accounts from Portugal? That some thousand houses, and many thousand persons, are no more ! that a fair city is now in ruinous heaps | Is there indeed a God that judges the world? And is he now making inquisition for blood? If so, it is not surprising, he should begin there, where so much blood has been poured on the * This quotation from IIorace is thus translated by Boscawen : “"Tis your own interest that calls When flames invade your neighbour's walls."-l.pl r. ground like water ! where so many brave men have been murdered, in the most base and cowardly as well as barbarous manner, almost every day, as well as every night, while none regarded or laid it to heart. “Let them hunt and destroy the precious life, so we may secure our stores of gold and precious stones.”* How long has their blood been crying from the earth! Yea, how long has that bloody House of Mercy,t the scandal not only of all religion, but even of human mature, stood to insult both heaven and earth ! “And shall I not visit for these things, saith the Lord? Shall not my soul be avenged on such a city as this?” It has been the opinion of many, that even this nation has not been without some marks of God’s displeasure. Has not war been let loose even within our own land, so that London itself felt the alarm? Has not a pestilential sickness brokcn in upon our cattle, and, in many parts, left not one of them alive? And although the earth does not yet open in England or Ireland, has it not shook, and reeled to and fro like a drunken man? and that not in one or two places only, but almost from one end of the kingdom to the other?